Thursday, February 19, 2015

Sergei Parajanov’s ‘The Color of Pomegranates’

One of my
favorite films is going to be shown in Los Angeles soon: Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates
(Նռան
գույնը, 1969), from
the late, unlamented Soviet Union.
The film will be shown at the venue Cinefamily on Fairfax Avenue
beginning Friday, February 20.
Because I can’t get around as well as I used to, I haven’t been to
Cinefamily since it was the old Silent Movie Theatre. But they screen such intriguing fare that I’m sure it would
be worth the trip. Speaking
of “worth the trip,” I once made the trek from L.A. to San Francisco and stayed
there for a week just to be able to watch The Color of Pomegranates several times at a Mission
District movie theatre. Why didn’t
I just watch it on video? Because
it wasn’t available at the time. I
was so knocked out by the movie the first time I saw it circa 1979 (at a
special screening at the University of Southern California) that I wanted to
write about it. When the film was
finally distributed in the U.S. by Kino International, it was booked for a
screening at the Roxie. Wanting to
see it again, and wring an article out of the experience, I thought that
traveling the almost 400 miles to get there was a bargain.

The
Color of Pomegranates
remains one of the most unusual films that I’ve ever seen. Ostensibly about the life of the
Armenian poet Sayat-Nova (c. 1712-1795), the movie isn’t a standard biopic but
a series of presentational tableaux and pantomime, which do little more than
insinuate the events in its subject’s life story. Writer-director Parajanov (like Sayat-Nova, an ethnic
Armenian born in Soviet Georgia) cloaks these cinematic happenings in colorful
and intricately designed costumes that dazzle the eye. In the late 1970s, most Americans, including
myself, didn’t think of Soviet culture beyond the gray tones of Moscow: the
existence of all these other ethnic cultures beyond Russia (Armenian, Georgian,
Ukrainian, Azerbaijani, etc.) was off our radars. To see a Soviet culture brought so stunningly and
enigmatically to life was nothing short of a revelation to me.

Director Sergei Parajanov

However, The
Color of Pomegranates
wasn’t the first Parajanov film that I had seen. That distinction — and what a distinction it is! — goes to
his Ukrainian production Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (Тінізабутихпредків, 1964), which I first saw on my local Washington P.B.S.
station in the mid-’70s (although it took me a while to realize that the two
films had the same director). Shadows
of Forgotten Ancestors was another disorienting blast of noise and color, one that pinned me
to my chair in front of the TV and wouldn’t let go. If Parajanov could direct two such stunning films, he was
definitely someone I wanted to write an article about.

Here is a
link to the article that I wrote about Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The Color of Pomegranates, the article that I went to San
Francisco to write (my article uses the Russified Romanization of the
director’s name: Paradzhanov — and for some reason, the periodical captions the stills from the film with the alternate title, Red Pomegranate). The
version of The Color of Pomegranates that I saw was the Russian cut that had been made after
Parajanov’s Armenian edit had been taken out of his hands. The Russian version was the only cut of
the film available for viewing in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, after the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991, Parajanov’s original Armenian version became available
again. The Russian cut of The
Color of Pomegranates
possesses some aspects that I like, such as the division of the events into
chapters that can be followed more easily, and I like the ending imagery of the
Russian version better than the Armenian version. But it’s still good to finally see Parajanov’s original
vision (which I first viewed at a Los Angeles film festival in the mid-1990s). And here is a link to film critic Tony Rayns’s explanatory article on The Color of Pomegranates, which helped me a great deal in
writing my own. (Here is also a link to the Russian version of The Color of Pomegranates on YouTube.)

One of
the great tragedies of cinema is that Parajanov was persecuted by the Soviet
authorities for most of his career.After he found his voice with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors and The
Color of Pomegranates,
he wasn’t allowed to make another feature film until 1985 with The Legend of Suram Fortress (ამბავისურამისციხისა) in Georgia.He only completed one more feature, Ashik Kerib (აშიკიქერიბი, 1988).While shooting The Confession (Խոստովանանք) in 1990, he took ill, and The
Confession
remained uncompleted when Parajanov died later that year.The mind staggers to contemplate all of
the visionary films that Parajanov wasn’t allowed to make.At least the Green Integer Press in 1998
printed a small paperback of seven of Parajanov’s film treatments, SevenVisions, which
can give us a small glimpse into the splendors of the screen that might have
been.